the poetics of space / gaston bachelard

... by overlaying our memory of the childhood house with daydreams leads us to the ill-defined, vaguely located areas of being where we are seized with astonishment at being.

Thus, on the threshold of our space, before the era of our own time, we hover between awareness of being and loss of being. And the entire reality of memory becomes spectral.

[… fingertip memory. How does the body, not merely the mind, remember the feel of a latch in a long-forsaken childhood home? …]

We live fixations, fixations of happiness. ‘We comfort ourselves by reliving memories of protection.

Of course, thanks to the house, a great many of our memories are housed.

 … to de-socialize our important memories, and attain to the plane of the daydreams that we used to have in the places identified with our solitude .

Memories are motionless, and the more securely they are fixed in space, the sounder they are.

Memories of dreams, however, which only poetic meditation can help us to recapture, are most confused, less clearly drawn.

In point of fact, we are in the unity of image and memory, in the functional composite of imagination and memory. The positivity of psychological history and geography cannot serve as a touchstone for determining the real being of our childhood, for childhood is certainly greater than reality.

It is our consciousness that crystalizes our remote memories.

To inhabit oneirically the house we were born in means more than to inhabit it in memory; it means living in the house that is gone, the way we used to dream in it.

The phenomenology of the daydream can untangle the complex of memory and imagination; it becomes necessarily sensitive to the differentiations of the symbol.

… real images are engravings, for it is the imagination that engraves them in our memories.

Great images have both a history and a pre-history; they are always a blend of memory and legend, with the result that we never experience an image directly.

How suddenly our memories assume a living possibility of being!

Our memories are encumbered by facts.

Amazon Books.

The classic book on how we experience intimate spaces.

"A magical book. . . . A prism through which all worlds from literary creation to housework to aesthetics to carpentry take on enhanced—and enchanted-significances. Every reader of it will never see ordinary spaces in ordinary ways. Instead the reader will see with the soul of the eye, the glint of Gaston Bachelard." —from the foreword by John R. Stilgoe